One of the more interesting vagaries in any campaign season is when an incumbent politician puts out is press release abut something that happened in their district, but doesn't make it clear what role they played in making it happen.

Such was the case Monday when Fifth District Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty's office put out a press release about Meriden-based drug maker Protein Sciences receiving a $669,156 grant from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The funding is from the National Cancer Institute through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and will be used to support lung cancer treatment. 

The release is pretty standard fare, with Esty saying nice things about the company and Protein Sciences saying nice things about the Democratic congresswoman. What neither side makes clear is whether Esty had a hand in securing the funding.

If she did, then she should make it clear. Because otherwise it looks like an attempt to hitch her campaign's wagon to some positive news in the Fifth District.

Esty, a Cheshire woman, is smart enough and honorable enough to know better than to leave it open to question. She's also an experienced lawmaker who is good enough at what she does to know better.

Here's what Esty and the company said said in the press release. First, Esty:
 

“Protein Sciences is on the cutting edge of developing innovative healthcare solutions for the 21^st century, and it is no surprise that the Department of Health and Human Services awarded this funding,” she said. “Last year when I toured their facility, I saw first-hand how Protein Sciences stands as a global leader in the biotech industry, creating jobs here in Connecticut. This grant will allow Protein Sciences to continue to deliver life-saving technologies to effectively treat lung cancer patients and keep our families healthy.”

Now here's what Dan Adams, executive vice chairman and global head of business development for Protein Sciences said:

 

“We are gratified to be awarded this contract to help develop a novel approach to treating patients with lung cancer,” he said. “We are collaborating with UCLA and Vault Nano Inc., developers of the vault approach to targeted cell delivery, and using our proprietary baculovirus technology to manufacture recombinant vaults that will deliver a potent chemokine to tumors.

“Elizabeth Esty has been a strong supporter of our company and its proprietary technology that can transform the vaccine business with products such as Flublok and vaults.  She has been a leader in promoting groundbreaking Connecticut technologies such as ours in Washington, and we greatly appreciate her help,”  Adams said.

In the interest of full disclosure, an Esty staffer did reach out to me Monday and offered to provide me with additional information beyond the release. Coverage of other stories Monday did not permit me to make a call back.

I will follow up with a call to the Esty campaign Tuesday in an effort to get some answers to the questions that have been raised in this post. But tell me, dear reader, what conclusions do you draw having read what Esty and the company said. 

When she ran for her first term in Congress two years ago, Elizabeth Esty used a former funeral home in Cheshire as her base of operations. It was a curious choice, at best, given that there were other vacant store fronts in town and the limitless potential it provided for wisecracks about her candidacy.


At this time two years ago, Esty was locked in a three-way primary battle with Connecticut House Speaker Chris Donovan and Dan Roberti for the state's Fifth District Congressional seat.

Esty upset the heavily favored Donovan, who had been the state Democratic convention nominee in 2012, and Roberti in the primary. She then beat Republican State Senator Andrew Roraback in November general election to fill the Fifth District seat, which was left open when Chris Murphy chose to run for U.S. Senate.

Now running for re-election as the Fifth District incumbent, Esty's choice of campaign digs has gotten a little more refined.

She kicked off her campaign Saturday with an open house at the new headquarters, which is located in an office complex at 408 Highland Ave., just down the street from Highland Elementary School.

 Esty is shown above in a photo from her campaign's Twitter account meeting a "future voter" and the child's mother at Saturday's open house.

Esty, who is a Cheshire resident, will face Republican Mark Greenberg of Litchfield in the November general election. Greenberg won his party's nomination at last month's state Republican convention at Mohegan Sun.

Prior to this year's convention, Greenberg had made two failed attempts to be the GOP nominee for the Fifth District seat.

Connecticut Congreswoman Elizabeth Esty (D-5) joined House Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra, Vice-Chairman Joe Crowley, and Congresswoman Nita Lowey for a press conference on legislative priorities in the new Congress as she discussed the work of the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

 Esty is from Cheshire and her district includes Newtown. The shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December prompted the creation of the task force, of which she is a member.

Representative-elect Elizabeth Esty (shown at left) will serve on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee when her first term as Connecticut's Congresswoman representing the 5th Congressional District begins next month.

 The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has jurisdiction over all modes of transportation: aviation, maritime transportation, roads, bridges, mass transit, and railroads.  It also oversees other aspects of the nation's infrastructure, such as clean water and waste water management, the transport of resources by pipeline, flood damage reduction and the activities of the Army Corps of Engineers and the various missions of the Coast Guard.

 The Committee is one of the largest in Congress, according to its website, with 59 members and has six subcommittees. Those subcommittees are:

• Aviation
• Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation
• Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management
• Highways and Transit
• Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials
• Water Resources and Environment

Esty said that while campaigning for office, the people of the 5th District told her "that infrastructure and transportation needs are critical to long-term growth in Connecticut."

"Serving on this important committee will provide me with the opportunity to advance a comprehensive transportation plan to help keep down commuting costs for workers, help small businesses and manufacturers save money and create jobs, and promote new industries while providing the necessary infrastructure to ensure their success," she said in a written statement.

Esty will get a second Congressional Committee assignment that hasn't been announced yet.

A month after Elizabeth Esty's campaign team turned Nixonian and declined to let the New Haven Register take a small peek inside the veil of her campaign for Connecticut's Fifth District Congressional seat, it has released it's "secret" campaign strategy.

A commercial about shoes.

Okay, not really. The shoes are supposed to represent a metaphor for how hard working Esty will be if she gets elected to Congress.

As campaign commercials go, it's not bad, but it's not exactly memorable either. Certainly not a game changer, as many contend that this 1960s presidential campaign commercial was.

It begs the question about why the campaign would not want free publicity about the making of it. And that's just what I asked one day last month when Esty's film crew turned up in my Cheshire neighborhood.

 Jeb Fain, her campaign spokesman, offered a terse "we don't comment on campaign strategy" that day when I told him I was interested in doing a story on what was going with the video shoot. And shortly after standing in my way when I asked to shoot video of what was going on, her campaign operatives made a hasty departure from the neighborhood.

Esty's campaign predictably upbeat about the release of the commercial on Tuesday.

“We’re excited to begin a new phase of the campaign,” Esty's Campaign Manager Julie Sweet said in a written statement. “Elizabeth has been getting out and meeting with folks all across the district since beginning her campaign over a year ago. Our field team and volunteers have already knocked on thousands of doors and made tens of thousands of phone calls to voters in our grassroots effort. This ad will ensure that Elizabeth can reach as many new voters as possible with her message of accountability and commonsense problem solving to fix Washington.”

Political commercials are supposed to say something about the kind of leader that the subject of the advertisement will be.

 But in this case, could it be that the Esty campaign's behavior in dealing with an innocent media request speaks to the kind of elected official she would be? Would Congresswoman Esty be open and transparent in office as we expect our public officials to be?

I don't pretend to know the answer to that question. But as someone who knows me very well said  Tuesday morning  when I told her the story of the mishegas surrounding the campaign commercial, "Some things need to be kept private. This wasn't one of them."

It's not everyday that a high stakes Congressional campaign comes to your neighborhood, but that's exactly what happened to me on my way into work Thursday.

As I was pulling out of  the driveway Thursday afternoon, my quiet Cheshire street was filled with cars. Now that in itself isn't unusual; one of my neighbors used to pack the neighborhood with visitors when she hosted Garden Club meetings in her home.

What made Thursday's gathering so unusual was the presence of more than a dozen members of a video or film crew shooting something with Democratic Fifth District Congressional Candidate Elizabeth Esty, who also lives in Cheshire.

Mrs. Esty (shown at left) was getting the full-blown star treatment: Lighting, expensive microphones and one of those umbrellas that photographers or videographers use to make sure their subjects are properly back lit. All that was missing was a wind machine blowing her hair back with an artificial breeze.

All of this was taking place on a public sidewalk, next to a public street, in a neighborhood that never sees the unblinking glare of cameras. And for the record, Mrs. Esty knows I live on that street; she once hand delivered a press release to my mailbox.

Now, even for a jaded journalist like me, it's pretty interesting when you get a behind-the-scenes look at a campaign in action. And I figured that New Haven Register readers might share that interest, too, if for no other reason than the Fifth District Congressional Race has gotten a whole lot more intriguing since the FBI arrested the campaign finance manger of Esty's Democratic rival, House Speaker Chris Donovan.

So I dutifully grabbed my pen, reporters notebook and Flip video camera and headed down the street, hoping to put together an interesting - and totally non-controversial - story on what the campaign was doing.

Evidently, that was a big mistake on my part. Because as I walked down the street to begin videotaping the crew that was working with Esty, her campaign spokesman, Jeb Fain, approached me.

I won't bore you with a word-for-word replay of the encounter, but suffice it to say that Fain told me that the campaign doesn't care to comment on its strategy leading up to the August primary that will decide whether Esty, Dovovan or Dan Roberti represents the party in November.

Now, having been a sportswriter as a young reporter, I fully understand the idea of not wanting to tip off your opponent to what your next play is going to be.

 But from my perspective, it's not a particularly bright idea turning down free publicity, especially when it doesn't involve having to answer really delicate questions about your candidate's chief rival and any illegal activities his campaign may or may not have engaged him. And being the shy, quiet soul that I am, I told Fain that.

 Politely, of course, because after all, he's not really a bad guy. I've even run into him at the local Stop & Shop once.

But with Fain unwilling to talk about what was going on that point, I figured that I'd just shoot a little video of the candidate and her camera crew at work and put it up on the New Haven Register's web site.

Doing that would have been pretty simple, except for the fact that Fain and a female campaign operative, whose name escapes me at the moment, weren't moving out of my way. And they kept repeating that they were "on a tight schedule today" like it was some mantra from the Hare Krishna movement.

I was tempted to tell them if they were in such a hurry, then let me do what I needed to do with my video camera and I'll stay out of the crew's way. But instead, I reminded them that they were on public property and I was within my rights to use my camera because of that.

Their response? "We'd really rather you didn't."

At that point, I probably should have pressed the record button on my Flip camera and started shooting. But  in the news business. sometimes you've got to pick your spot to push things to the limit and in my judgement this wasn't one of them. So, in an effort to save face, I told them I needed to call my editors to see what they wanted to do.

 I walked out of their earshot to call my bosses and in the time it took me to do that - no more than two minutes - every member of Team Esty had packed up their equipment, gotten in their cars and gone off to find another quiet suburban street, either in Cheshire or somewhere else in the Fifth District.

 Here's hoping that they didn't pick one of the other streets in Cheshire that I know reporters from various news organizations live on. I would have been happy to have given them a tour if they'd had more time

As the primary campaign gets closer to Aug. 14th, I'll be interested to see how Esty's team deploys this video. Given what has happened with Donovan's campaign, they ought to be looking at what happened to him as a gift, something that they can use to remind voters of how much more electable Esty could be based on the fact that her political name isn't mired in scandal right now.

But if my chance encounter with them on Thursday was any indication, this campaign is running scared. They're exhibiting the kind of political paranoia that views one simple daily campaign story as something that could blow Esty's chances to advance to November general election.